Cable Woes.
Jan. 18th, 2008 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupYesterday, we went out and bought a $40 USB-to-Centronics cable so I could connect my old Laserjet printer to my new computer. Apparently all one needs to do on Windows XP is plug it in, and it should work. Except it doesn't.
Oh, Windows recognizes the cable alright. It gives its 'new hardware' noise and 'USB Printing Support' suddenly appears in the device menu. However, I can't find any way to get my printer to work. When I was using![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sps's USB hub (which also had printing support) I ended up with a new USB001 port which worked fine. After my experiments I have USB001 through USB003, none of which work. The scant documentation for the cable claims that an LPT port should simply appear, and it should be annotated as a USB-to-LPT port. No such thing happens. There IS an LPT1 but it doesn't do anything.
I looked up both the cable model number (Dynex DX-UBPC) and its chipset (Prolific Technology Inc PL-2305 USB to IEEE 1284 Bridge Controller). All my research says that it should 'just work', but it doesn't. Grump!
EDIT: I just uninstalled all my printer drivers, unplugged the cable and plugged it back in. I did this a hundred times yesterday. This time it just worked. It autodetected my printer and installed the driver for it. Now I just need to reconfigure its options and I should be good to go.
Oh, Windows recognizes the cable alright. It gives its 'new hardware' noise and 'USB Printing Support' suddenly appears in the device menu. However, I can't find any way to get my printer to work. When I was using
sps's USB hub (which also had printing support) I ended up with a new USB001 port which worked fine. After my experiments I have USB001 through USB003, none of which work. The scant documentation for the cable claims that an LPT port should simply appear, and it should be annotated as a USB-to-LPT port. No such thing happens. There IS an LPT1 but it doesn't do anything.I looked up both the cable model number (Dynex DX-UBPC) and its chipset (Prolific Technology Inc PL-2305 USB to IEEE 1284 Bridge Controller). All my research says that it should 'just work', but it doesn't. Grump!
EDIT: I just uninstalled all my printer drivers, unplugged the cable and plugged it back in. I did this a hundred times yesterday. This time it just worked. It autodetected my printer and installed the driver for it. Now I just need to reconfigure its options and I should be good to go.
